Our times are strange. Dumpsters filled with perfectly functional automobiles most likely will seem peculiar to a viewer looking back 50 years from now. I’m not sure I can say where I stand on the whole idea or where I would park my clunker, but I definitely find the whole thing amusing in the same way one would find the decorations of a funeral parlor laughably-tacky during a service.
A wise geography professor, who has been teaching about global warming since the early seventies, said to me at a gathering last night, “You will see the big one in your life time,” referring to a larger economic crisis than the present. “With the bank buyouts, we most likely just evaded it for the time being. Now they will feed the economy and continue the same direction that we have been.” There was a fatalism in his voice that you never want to hear from a thoughtful, educated veteran of such issues. You want to believe his years of insight have given him a premonition of the idyllic future. Our talk of economy turned more towards home economics and the unsustainablilty of our lifestyles and those to follow. In the same vein of the above-mentioned chuckle at a funeral parlor, we both had a laugh at the idea brought up in the book A World Without Us that if humans were to die right NOW the world would be perfectly fine. It would recover.